


because it's you that sets the test

by equestrianstatue



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Erik Lehnsherr's Barely Concealed Telepathy Kink, Extensive Chess Foreplay, M/M, Mansion Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:47:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23899972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: “Well, why don’t you train with me?” Erik asks. He tries to sound casual, even magnanimous. Not to make it obvious that the idea of Charles in his head twists at some nameless place inside him, irresistible and not entirely pleasant, like pulling at a scab.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 51
Kudos: 291





	because it's you that sets the test

**Author's Note:**

> Everything that takes place in this fic is explicitly consensual, but it involves literally relinquishing control of one's mind and body during sex, in case this is something you would prefer not to read about. (If you _would_ like to read about this, then I have 7,000 words of good news for you below.)

The year that Erik meets Charles is patterned in heat. The prickle of it under Erik’s collar, sweat at the back of his knees.

It’s not the weather, or it’s not only the weather— it’s summer in Miami when they meet, yes, but Erik has travelled much of the world by then, had his neck burned by hotter suns. And up-country, up-state, at Charles’s house, the weather grows cooler in the autumn. Charles hopes for an Indian summer, peers up at the leaves as they turn crisp and golden: that would be nice, wouldn’t it, he suggests, a last hoorah before winter sets in. But Erik is still waking in the middle of the night, stuffy and constricted in a too-warm bed; still taking cold showers and finding his skin hot beneath the water.

It’s Charles, and not the weather, or rather it’s the persistence of Charles. The unfamiliar experience of being at close quarters with someone for long enough for Erik to feel whatever it is he feels about him. Friendship, as Charles keeps saying, as if such a thing is equally welcome and familiar to them both. And yes, it is friendship, this strange liking for someone to whom you are not bound in blood, a liking that persists despite an understanding of what it is that makes them so very different. Perhaps, even, because of it.

Charles likes them all, of course, because Charles finds liking easy. He cares obviously for Raven, flirts blithely and politely with Moira, and plays older brother and mother hen to the others in turn, clucking over his unexpected roost. But it is Erik he solicits for conversation and company in the evenings. Erik he likes to try himself against.

The battlefield between them: the chessboard. Charles is in his element here, amongst civilised rules and infinite stratagems. He wins more often than he loses, but he doesn’t always win. Erik is less grounded in the theory, but the better improviser when his back is against the wall. “No peeking, I promise,” Charles had said, the first time they played, and Erik had frowned; there was nothing to hide in chess, no cards to hold against the body. Then he had realised that Charles had meant he wouldn’t— to win a game— peel open the casing of Erik’s mind and take a look at his tactics.

It fascinates Erik, Charles’s power. Not just its strength but its scope, its thousand little tendrils of possibility. Erik wants to pull it apart as easily as he would a transistor, examine its component parts and learn it from the inside out. Just as easily as Charles had pulled Erik apart, that first night in the water. Erik remembers the sensation of it, the lightheadedness. At the time, he had assumed it was because he was beginning to drown. It may have been Charles and the water both.

“What’s your training regime?” Erik asks him one night, watching Charles study the board.

“Hmm?” says Charles, looking up. He is sat bent forward in his chair, the better to survey the ground. His elbows are on his knees, his chin on his joined hands.

“For your power. You have a programme to hone the rest of us. I assume you’re doing the same yourself.”

“Oh,” says Charles. He looks slightly surprised. “Not as such.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I’ve been at home with my mutation for a very long time. I’m lucky, of course, a telepath, I can…” Charles seems to check himself, reconsider his wording, and Erik realises what he was about to say: _I can hide_. “I can keep my talents private,” Charles says instead, with an odd, slightly crooked smile.

Erik raises his eyebrows— _talents_ is unusual, Charles is generally self-effacing to a fault— and the whole thing, the smile, the way he lets the phrase slip out, sounds roundly flirtatious in a way that throws Erik off-kilter.

To be thrown off-kilter so often, at so little notice, is new. Erik has always considered sexual desire with a level eye: a base animal function, unremarkable and unavoidable. He is familiar with the experience of want, sometimes fulfilled, sometimes not. But the concern has always been secondary. Subsumable beneath the things that matter, beneath his steel-eyed focus on Shaw and the rest. Animals don’t take revenge, after all.

But never before has a desire like this had such opportunity for persistence. Not a fleeting idea, but a sustained campaign by some tenacious part of Erik’s mind against his usually equable body. He has no defence against a fresh reminder of Charles every day, a new part of him for Erik to notice. Perhaps the redness of his lower lip, or his fingers as he pushes the hair back from his forehead, or the soap-smell of him in the mornings. The smell of him all the time, lingering under Erik’s nose; it makes him want to haul Charles in and bury his face in his neck, his armpit, breathe him in. A sharp-toothed, bestial urge, barely caged.

Erik wonders if it shows. If the thoughts drift off him like the scent off Charles, lurid and obvious, however much Charles is or isn’t trying to read them. Erik’s mind has been at work without his say-so, stitching together all those little component parts. Charles’s careful hands, the bend of his neck under the short sweep of his hairline. His bare chest and arms, once, a towel round his waist as he opened the door to his hotel room one early morning on the road, Erik’s mouth suddenly dry as dust.

It would be easier to deal with, perhaps, if Charles were not the sort of person he is. If he didn’t watch Erik demonstrate his own talents with such open interest and delight, if he were less free with his praise, more guarded with his fondness. He likes Erik, and sees no problem with doing so. Insists on being kind to him. Erik has little experience in bearing such a thing. And almost none in how to navigate the particular and constant current of attention Charles pays to him, coy and earnest by turns.

“So in a way,” Charles is saying, “I’ve been training myself since I was a child.”

Erik says, “Listening in on the servants?” It comes out as more of a jab than he means it to, but either it doesn’t connect, or Charles doesn’t rise to it.

“The opposite, actually,” he says. “Trying not to. It’s always been a case of… limitation. Increasing my control through moderation, rather than trying to flex the muscle harder.”

“So you’re not challenging yourself?”

“I didn’t say that. You try sharing a house all of a sudden with the minds of several teenagers.”

Erik gives him a thin smile. “But like you said, you’ve been practising blocking people out for years. If we’re going to be ready to fight…”

Charles shakes his head. “I’m here to help everyone else. That’s my job.”

“No, you have a power like anyone else’s. Well. Unlike anyone else’s.” Erik sits back in his chair, allows himself to study Charles’s rather evasive expression, trying to follow the thread of his reticence. “I see. You can’t train yourself, because who would you train yourself _on_?”

“Something like that,” says Charles. He rubs at his chin, looking again at the chessboard, and then back up at Erik. “You can’t _test_ things on other people’s minds without being sure of the consequences. Brains are delicate. They’re not disposable material, something for trial and error. Not like— Alex and his mannequins. Sean blowing up glass bulbs.”

“Moving a coin.”

“No,” Charles agrees, “exactly.”

“Well, why don’t you train with me?” Erik asks. He tries to sound casual, even magnanimous. Not to make it obvious that the idea of Charles in his head twists at some nameless place inside him, irresistible and not entirely pleasant, like pulling at a scab.

Charles is already shaking his head. “That’s good of you, Erik, but— ”

“No, I mean it,” Erik says. “I told you to stay out of my head once, I know. But it’s different if I’m offering.”

“No, it’s not,” says Charles. “You don’t know _what_ you’re offering. You don’t know what I can do.”

Charles closes his mouth, looking as if he hadn’t meant to sound quite so portentous, but the statement hangs between them in the silence.

“That’s true,” Erik says, after a pause. “I don’t.”

The thought excites him, and as Charles looks back at him, Erik knows that he can tell.

“Well,” says Charles, “let’s say I’ll think about it.”

Charles has lit the fire in the grate this evening, and it’s roaring. Erik can feel it on his skin, making his palms tingle, his sweater cling to his shoulders.

He watches as Charles leans forward and moves his king, a nudge of his finger and thumb. Then Charles sits back in his chair, picks up his whisky, and takes a drink. Erik’s eye catches unthinkingly on the swallow of his throat, and there is a quick, inevitable ripple of unbidden thought: what the skin of Charles’s neck would feel like if Erik were to touch his tongue to it, put his fingers around it.

When Erik wakes in the too-hot night, here under the vast hospitality of Charles’s roof, it is always to some obscene half-dreamed fantasy. The lush wet warmth of Charles’s mouth on him, or the red head of Charles’s cock disappearing and reappearing in Erik’s fist, or tasting the sweat at Charles’s collarbone as Erik pushes inside him. The coarseness of the images takes him aback slightly, even as he comes awake to find he is already hard and knuckling at himself, skin burning. And then, day after day: showering, dressing, combing his hair, in preparation for Charles’s easy smile at the breakfast table, his calisthenics in the grounds, and the rich, heavy quiet of a game of chess before bed.

Erik blinks and looks down, wipes his mind of everything but the chessboard. Tries to ignore the smile on Charles’s face that means: _your move_.

Erik loses.

“Better luck tomorrow,” Charles says, afterwards. He is picking up both of their glasses, taking them back to the drinks cabinet in the corner of the room, as Erik re-sets the pieces on the board. There is the clink of bottles moving, the sound of Charles yawning, which he does into the crook of his elbow, a disarmingly boyish gesture. Imagine: such power behind such a frontage.

“I meant it, earlier,” Erik says, as he rises from his chair. “You should be training, too. Pushing yourself. I could help you.”

“Erik.” Charles looks oddly fond, and slightly exasperated. He glances towards the ceiling. “There’s already plenty to be getting on with. Some of them have barely scratched the surface of their abilities. I’m not the focus here.”

“But you’ve barely scratched the surface of yours,” Erik says. “Haven’t you?”

Charles’s expression shifts, just a little. There is something harder in it, more wary. “Erik,” he says, again, an edge of warning in it this time. Erik had never imagined the two syllables of his own name could contain the nuances he has heard Charles speak into them.

Erik says, “I’m not afraid of you, you know.”

Charles frowns at this. “No, of course not. You shouldn’t be. Why would you be?”

Charles, who can sift through a mind as easily as sand, could presumably shatter a person’s reality from the inside, if he tried. Or _without_ trying. Erik doesn’t know. It makes his pulse quicken, when he thinks about it.

“I think I probably should be, actually,” Erik says. “But I’m not.”

“You know I’m no threat to you,” says Charles. He doesn’t look like one, still stood beside the drinks cabinet, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves at his back, one hand in his pocket. “I never would be.”

He already is, of course. The way he has burrowed inside Erik without recourse to his powers, turning Erik wild with this implacable wanting, this unwarranted liking. They are dangerous, those two things together. Perhaps more dangerous still under the circumstances that they could be— matched. Returned. It is safe to be alone, to keep the only key to oneself. It is how Erik has survived, these past eighteen years. To want anyone the way he wants Charles is untenable. And to want someone who has no need of keys, who could open any door in the mind with barely a push— well.

Charles is watching him. “What is it that’s troubling you, my friend?” he asks, his expression soft with consternation.

Erik considers, suddenly and for the first time, whether Charles might not be playing with him, just a little. It does not seem possible that Charles has no conception of what it is that’s troubling him. Erik wonders how long Charles has been watching him prowl the perimeter of his own mind; how long Charles will continue to watch him for, how many lopsided smiles and clasps of the shoulder he will throw into Erik’s path. One man’s refusal to press an advantage is another’s bear-baiting.

Erik crosses the floor of the study, and Charles looks up at him. His eyebrows are raised, questioning, even as Erik rests an arm on the bookshelf, bracketing Charles, penning him in. It is a reflexive gesture of physical control that, under the circumstances, means nothing.

“Do you really want the answer to that question?” Erik asks him.

Erik’s desire must be blaring, rolling off him. Charles breathes in as if he can taste it. The tip of his tongue flicks over his bottom lip, and he nods.

The kiss Erik presses to Charles’s mouth is quick but devouring, sating himself for only a moment with the heat of it. It is as good as he had imagined. Better. Charles lets out a pleased sort of noise as he does it, and he leans in and up to fit them closer together, tilting his head back; and then Erik is lost. There is no thought, no plan, only one of Erik’s hands grasping Charles at the hip, and the satisfaction of his mouth taking its second taste. And there is Charles, turning almost liquid under him, so pliant within the little cage Erik has made around him. No thought of escape.

“I’m not afraid of you, either,” says Charles, when Erik pulls back again. There is a bubble of something like laughter in his voice, underneath the hard-kissed breathlessness, and he is smiling.

No, Erik thinks, he shouldn’t be. Charles is, perhaps, the one person who has no need to be. Out loud, he says, “Good.”

Charles’s smile turns sharper, and Erik grins back at him, wide and fierce. Then he has Charles pressed up against the bookcase at his back, much harder, letting out a little of the savagery inside him. This isn’t rage— it’s not intelligent enough to be rage— but something far more primal. Erik can feel minuscule vibrations beginning in the strap and casing of Charles’s watch, in the buckle of his belt. The small change in Charles’s pockets jangles together. And Charles opens himself up to it all with a sigh that sounds like relief. He lets himself be pushed, bares his throat for Erik to scrape his teeth against, leans back so that his legs fall open enough for Erik’s thigh to fit between them. It’s heady, intoxicating— but not what Erik had expected.

 _Fight back, Charles_ , Erik thinks, half-amused, half-frustrated. He doesn’t intend to say it to Charles directly, but Charles smiles up at him and asks, “Why would you want this to be a fight?”

Erik doesn’t answer, but he feels the give of Charles’s flesh under his hands as he tightens them on his arms.

“What if I have no interest in fighting you?” Charles says, or rather murmurs. His voice is warm, close to Erik’s ear, inches away from his mind. “Anything, Erik. I’ll let you have it.”

Erik feels that in every extremity of his body, a flare of heat that burns in his fingers. But he says, “I don’t want to you _let_ me do anything, Charles, I want you to— ”

Erik’s jaw clenches, the cascade of images spilling out before he can think to stop them, a flipbook of indecent fantasy. It doesn’t matter: Charles must already know. But in his imagination, Charles is never _submitting_ to Erik, yielding to what he wants. He’s pushing up against him, or panting and clawing at Erik’s back, as desperate as Erik is, he’s—

“You want me to beg you for it,” says Charles. There’s something almost shocked in his sudden grin, and he even slides his eyes away in surprise, but only for a second. “ _Erik_ ,” he says, another new intonation of it on his tongue.

“I have no control, around you,” Erik admits, low in the back of his throat. “Perhaps I’d like to see you in the same position.”

This time, when Charles swallows, Erik watches the bob of his Adam’s apple without looking away. “Come upstairs with me,” Charles says.

*

Most of the newcomers to Charles’s house sleep along a corridor on the second floor, a row of guest rooms along the back of the building, looking out onto the sweep of the gardens. In what he supposes to be some concession to his privacy, Erik’s quarters are on the floor below, from which he can only occasionally hear the sound of overexcited young feet thumping up and down the corridor above him. But when Charles retires for the night, he disappears into a separate wing of the house entirely, as does Raven, and Erik has never followed him.

Erik supposes he had expected Charles’s bedroom to be a de facto extension of his study, a room in which he clearly feels at home: a sort of intellectual grandiosity, with hardwood bookcases and gilt-framed paintings, probably a four-poster bed. He is right about the bookcases. There is a writing desk under the window, too, with a stack of manila files and a decanter in one corner. But despite this, just beneath its surface of immediate use, the room feels immediately and obviously like a child’s bedroom.

Well: of course it is. A wealthy and precocious child— there is an antique-looking globe on a stand in one corner, and a table of the chemical elements hung above the desk— but at least one of the bookcases is full of comics and boys’ own adventure hardbacks, and there are what look like model planes gathering dust on one of the top shelves. There is a portable boxed record player at the end of another shelf, propping up a stack of records. Erik turns his head sideways to read the spines. Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Purcell; but there is also American jazz, American rock and roll. Can Charles dance? Erik can’t quite imagine it. His mind swims.

He supposes he has pictured Charles retiring to the master suite— but that, wherever it is, must have been the dominion of his parents. Erik doesn’t know who Charles’s parents are, or why they no longer live here, or when Charles last called this place home. A stepfather, Charles had mentioned once, but Erik hadn’t pressed any further.

“We came to live in America when I was nine,” Charles says. When Erik straightens up and looks round, Charles is closing the bedroom door behind him, smiling as he catches Erik’s eye. “Which was around the time my mutation first surfaced.” Charles taps at his temple, his funny little gesture to encompass something unimaginably large. “A coincidence, of course. But for some time, I thought this house was haunted.”

Erik is surprised into a laugh. Then, after a moment, he sees— not exactly an image, but something like the shadow of one. An idea, just perceptible. A boy in the bed in the corner of the room, the covers pulled up over his head, breathing fitfully as the voices come.

“But soon enough,” Charles says, letting his hand fall away from his temple, “I realised that the ghosts all sounded suspiciously like other people who lived here, and were in fact not dead.” He smiles, as if the memory is funny, although Erik can’t imagine that it is.

“And that it was you that was haunted,” Erik says.

Charles does laugh at this. “Yes, I suppose so.”

Some of the intensity of downstairs has dissipated, on the way up here, and in this little digression. There is still something palpable between them, but it seems to have slipped sideways from its earlier purpose. Erik feels out of place in this room, with the ghost of Charles’s childhood beside them. It seems somehow an inappropriate venue to bring the very adult business of a few minutes before. Maybe, Erik thinks, they should go to his room instead. A guest room, a nothing, a blank slate. He glances at the door.

“No,” says Charles, softly, catching his eye again. “This is— my space. It belongs to me. I like the idea of having you here.”

It’s disconcerting, as ever; hard to tell the difference between a reply to something Erik didn’t realise was being listened to, or Charles simply following the direction of his thoughts. And it’s hard to tell, too, if Charles means the words the way Erik hears them. He would like Charles to have him here. Erik splayed on the bed, their breath intermingling in the lamplight, Charles’s forehead pressed to his and Charles’s fingers inside him.

The breath catches in Erik’s throat, and that kettle-whistle of potential is back in the room. Charles can evidently feel it too, his gaze flickering for a moment down Erik’s body.

“How much have you been reading my mind, Charles?” Erik asks.

It’s not a trap, but Charles looks shifty. “It’s not as simple as all that, you know. I don’t always ask for it.” He gestures loosely in the air, a reminder of the conversation just gone, the voices long departed.

“But you’ve been training yourself for years.” Erik closes the gap between them. “You ought to be good at keeping out anything unsolicited by now.”

“Well,” says Charles, and he smiles, glances down. “It can be a little harder if I’m compromised. Distracted.”

Erik kisses him again, slow and deliberate, captures the breath from his mouth.

“Yes,” Charles murmurs. “Exactly.”

Perhaps this is the problem with Charles: for Erik he was never a distraction, and always a focus. Almost as soon as he understood what Charles was, Erik understood that he was a pathway to Shaw, and so naturally he has been paying Charles the same undivided attention as any of the steps towards his goal. Except somewhere along the way that attention has twisted, mutated into this hothouse longing, this steel-tipped point of want that makes Erik slide one hand through Charles’s hair and the other round to knead at his backside, pulling them together, his body almost shaking. But something has been simmering in Charles, too. He is not just pleased but eager, grinding up against Erik’s thigh, his hands at the small of Erik’s back, trying to slip below the waistband of his trousers. Yes, this is what Erik wants, exactly this— or almost exactly this.

“Charles,” he says, “Charles, I want— ”

Charles kisses him again, his mouth warm and smiling. “Yes?”

“I want to know how strong you are.”

Charles’s smile creases into half a frown, confused, but when Erik taps a finger to his own temple, he says, “Ah.”

“I want to feel it.”

“Erik…”

Before Charles can begin to argue, Erik leans in, a quick and unexpected assault, and bites at his earlobe. Not hard, but enough to make Charles yelp in surprise.

 _I mean it_ , Erik thinks, projecting the words clearly. _I can take it, you know. I’d_ like _to take it._ He knows that Charles can hear him, because he somehow _feels_ Charles’s reaction to this: a faint twist of something, surprise and arousal and unconcealed interest.

Erik knows, in the abstract, some of what Charles can do. He’s watched Charles lift thoughts from people’s minds as easily as a sheet of paper; it took less time for Charles to know Erik’s history than it would have taken for Erik to draw breath to begin the telling of it. In Russia, Charles had made the visible invisible, adjusted something inside the head of the guards and hidden them from view. But there must be more, too, Erik is sure. The planting of ideas that never existed. The erasure of ones that did.

“You could make me do anything, couldn’t you?” Erik says. “And make me think it was my idea.”

Charles is still pressed close to him, his red mouth half-open, something dark and serious in his eyes. After a moment, he says, “Yes.”

“Must be tempting.”

Charles smiles, shakes his head, more in frustration than denial.

“Show me,” says Erik, his voice low, anticipation curling hot and tight in his gut. “Come on. I’m asking. Show me what it feels like when you— ”

There is something blooming bright and warm in the centre of Erik’s mind, and he stops talking. It’s— a suggestion, an idea. It is strange and not a little disturbing to feel the current of it inside himself, the way it slips so smoothly into the cracks in his mind, side by side with his own thoughts. Perhaps somebody less single-minded than Erik would find it harder to recognise it as having come from outside himself, especially as Erik wanted to do it anyway. Did he, before? Yes, he did, but— it doesn’t matter. He moves his own muscles, but he is barely aware of doing so. His hand slides into the space between Charles’s thighs and grabs him through his trousers, feeling the firm ridge of his cock. It’s a relief to touch him, though how much of that is from the execution of the instruction and how much of it is from Erik himself is hard to tell.

Charles makes a noise in the back of his throat, a little sound of gratification. Then he smiles and says, “Is that what you meant?”

Erik can still feel some trace of Charles in his mind, warm and insidious, drifting across the plains of his thoughts. The intrusion— the intimacy— is astonishing, like nothing else. He moves his hand a little, squeezes at Charles, and breathes in the reality of him, this, them: Charles hard in his hand, experiencing perhaps a fraction of the wanting that inhabits Erik every day.

“Keep going,” says Erik.

“Erik, this isn’t…”

_I want you to keep going._

A pause, and then another little flare of thought flickers into life in Erik’s brain. It suggests that he kneel down, and— he flushes, heats further from the inside, as the image unspools between them, Erik on his knees and Charles in his mouth. Erik lets the idea hang there for a moment, the lewdness of it. Wonders why Charles has chosen this; whether it’s something he’s imagined before, Erik at his feet, or whether he has some sense that Erik is asking to be _used_ , or—

“You could physically make me do it, couldn’t you?” Erik asks. “Not just make me want to do it, you could— hold me. Move me.”

Charles’s fingers are curled lightly against his temple, his lip bitten. He says, “Yes.” Then he swallows, and adds, “You’re very— you’re good at fighting the suggestion.”

Erik hadn’t been aware that he was fighting it, although he can feel something like the stretch of a muscle, the pleasurable burn of it, as he holds the instruction at bay. The pull of unsnapped elastic. He smiles, and says, “What makes you think I want to fight?”

Then he lets himself sink into the ease of complying. He goes to his knees, and finds that they splay at just the angle that Charles, or both of them, had imagined. Charles’s belt is already unbuckling itself at Erik’s behest, his zip easing downwards, but Erik has to use his hands to open the front of his briefs and pull Charles’s erection from his underwear— and the relief as Erik slides his mouth over it, slow and careful, is exquisite. His own cock twitches as the heaviness sits on his tongue. Above him, Charles says, “Erik,” again, another new, breathless version of it.

Erik stays where he is, trying to relax his mind and his mouth. _Yes?_ he thinks, glancing upwards. _And now?_

Charles makes a bitten-off sort of noise, but he is not entirely out of Erik’s head, and Erik feels a little pulse of his reaction to this: Erik looking up at him, demanding his control. Some part of Charles likes this, too. And Erik— well, Erik has no interest in being at anyone’s mercy, but nothing is quite as it should be when it comes to Charles. Charles who makes him want so much that he can barely settle on a clear course of desire, Charles who keeps this astonishing strength so tightly leashed. And the thrill of testing that power, dragging it out of him, is tugging at the same part of Erik that _likes_ the hunt, and the chase, and hearing the rattle of someone’s last breath. The part of him that couldn’t ever have walked through this genteel idyll of chess and countryside without being drawn to the most volatile thing in it.

And so Charles shows Erik— tells Erik— what he wants. A series of instructions, somewhere between suggestion and insistence, Erik’s body happy to respond. His tongue teasing at the tip of Charles’s cock, and then his lips soft and pliable around it. A slow pump of Erik’s fist along its length to spread the wetness from his mouth around. “Yes,” Charles says, needlessly, shifting in pleasure as Erik moves in exactly the way he directs. “Like that, yes.” The hand not resting at his temple is fluttering by his hip, but then he lays it carefully on Erik’s shoulder, his fingers pressing in as Erik licks his way down to his own fist.

“Can you— ” murmurs Charles, and then there is the newest burst of thought, the idea-image-feeling of Erik pushing his mouth further down, swallowing Charles’s cock, Erik’s face pressed close to his belly.

Erik wants that, yes. _You’ll have to help, though_ , he thinks at Charles, feeling the hairs raise on the back of his neck.

Again, he feels Charles’s reaction to that: a spark of something almost scandalised, a sense of the forbidden, which at this point seems rather like splitting hairs. But then— Erik’s throat relaxes, not through his own control. The thought of it being Charles makes Erik’s pulse race, his own cock stiffen further, even as some other distant part of him protests at the invasion— but that only heightens the sensation. Just the smallest bit of his body handed entirely over to Charles, Erik’s gag reflex held impossibly at bay, so that Charles can push his way inside him. Charles curled around his brain stem and sliding down Erik’s throat all at once, inside him in every way he can be.

The more Erik surrenders to it, the more pleasurable it is. Charles’s hold on him is deft and precise: he has him by the throat only, and Erik is still moving his own head, is still gripping at Charles’s hips. He can feel the press of Charles’s fingers hard against his shoulder, clutching and releasing; can hear his quiet moan of satisfaction; can smell him where Erik’s nose is buried against the thatch of hair at the base of his cock. Erik’s pulse is loud in his ears.

Like this, Erik wonders idly how strong Charles’s hold on him is— but the moment he wonders whether it could be broken, it breaks. A failsafe on Charles’s part, presumably. Erik’s body is entirely his own again, Charles’s grip on his muscles retreating, and all at once Erik’s throat is constricting, spasming around Charles’s cock.

 _Charles!_ Erik thinks, not afraid but frustrated— how like Charles to pull back from the brink, even in this— and hits the flat of his hand against Charles’s hip. He struggles to control his own muscles, but it’s too sudden, and he is too long unpractised in this. Erik thinks for a moment that Charles is about to withdraw in every sense, can already imagine the fluster of apologies as Erik chokes him out of his mouth and his head— but then he feels Charles’s mind grab hold of him again, harder. His throat relaxes, held open, and Charles seems to have his airways, too. He breathes in and out through Erik’s nose for him, slow and measured and steady. Erik’s mind calms.

A new channel of arousal coils between them, although Erik doesn’t know which of them it comes from, at the appreciation of Charles’s control, the thrill of its exactitude. They are still for a moment. Erik’s jaw aches, and saliva pools in his mouth, his eyes watering. Charles’s fingers dig into his shoulder.

 _Are you going to come like this?_ Erik asks him. Charles’s hold on Erik doesn’t slip one bit, but his own hips stutter, very slightly. _Or do you just want to keep me like this until my throat is raw, for the fun of it?_ Charles draws in a shaky breath, but he doesn’t answer. _Will you last long enough to fuck me?_

“Erik,” Charles says, out loud, and it’s strange to hear the reality of his voice in the room again, the words scraping out into the air. “Erik, please— ”

Erik swallows around Charles’s cock, although he’s fairly certain he didn’t decide to do so. And then Charles is coming in quick, shivering pulses down his throat, gasping his name again, and still swallowing on his behalf.

They slide slowly apart, Charles’s control slipping away as Erik pulls his head back, as they disentangle. Erik coughs, wipes his slick mouth, his blood still pounding.

“Good God,” says Charles, faintly, at which Erik’s cough turns into a laugh.

When he looks up, Charles is flushed, slightly stunned-looking, and gazing down at Erik. He holds out a hand, and when Erik takes it, Charles pulls him to his feet.

“You’re extraordinary,” Charles says, which is funny, really, coming from him and following that. And yet, Erik thinks, they have still only waded into the shallows of Charles, of the thing that is folding itself away even now, hidden beneath the colour in his cheeks, his clear-cut voice and soft eyes.

Charles leans in and kisses Erik again, and despite the energy still thrumming inside him, Erik lets Charles kiss him slowly, as it seems he wants to. Erik can feel the weight of something behind that kiss, a boundless kind of affection that could, perhaps, do more damage than even Charles’s ferocious mind could manage. Erik lets it come. Lets himself— want it.

Then he feels Charles’s hand at his hip, groping for Erik’s cock, rock-hard and waiting. He hisses as Charles rubs the heel of his hand against him, as Charles pauses the kiss to hum into Erik’s mouth, sounding pleased and anticipatory and perhaps not so sated as he seems.

“Will you last long enough to fuck _me_?” Charles asks, and Erik takes him by the collar of his shirt and walks him straight backwards into the bed.

*

Afterwards, Charles curls himself against Erik’s body and lies in his arms. It is a slightly unnerving intimacy that Erik can’t think how not to permit, and more to the point, does not seem to want to. He lies still and quiet for a while as Charles dozes, the soft pressure of Charles’s nose tucked against his neck, the weight of Charles’s thigh over his leg. He allows a feeling to seep through him that he does not know how to name, settling in his bones, warming his skin in a way that is altogether different from the burn of his want. He has a suspicion that Charles would call the feeling _tenderness_. It is not a feeling that Erik generally imagines it safe to entertain.

Erik breathes in the smell of Charles’s hair, his sweat and shampoo, and lets his hand trail over Charles’s bare shoulder. He would like to see Charles better, actually, slip out from beneath him and look his fill at last, uninterrupted. For now, he begins to learn him by touch, running his fingers along Charles’s arm, tracing the line of his bicep. Charles is stockier, more stolid than he seems; there is something about the wool-cardiganed image of him, the boyish softness still in his face, that makes it slightly surprising. Another hidden reserve of power, though far less cataclysmic. Erik wonders where this one comes from.

“Have you ever boxed?” he asks, into the top of Charles’s head. The idea of this is slightly comical, but then again, Erik has been led to believe this is a pastime for English public schoolboys.

“What?” asks Charles, muzzily, and Erik feels rather than sees him smile. “No, not exactly my forte.”

“Wrestled?” Erik smiles to himself, too; he can’t really imagine Charles down on the mat, either. “Fenced?”

“None of the above.” Charles shifts a little, laying his head on the pillow so that he can see Erik’s face.

“You’re a sportsman of some kind,” Erik says. He must be: someone with Charles’s background would be in good physical condition for reasons of leisure.

“I rowed, at university,” Charles says.

“Ah,” Erik says. “Yes. Trust you.”

“Trust me to what?”

“To have found such a resoundingly collectivist way to keep fit.”

Charles laughs slightly at this, propping himself up on one elbow. “I’m not terribly sure the Boat Club would see it that way.”

No, Erik thinks, probably not; but how exactly like Charles to be drawn to something that requires closeness, communication, teamwork. Movement through the water that can only be achieved when a series of bodies rely upon one another.

Erik wonders exactly when it was that Charles became no longer a stepping stone to a destination, but a gateway to— well, the future. _A_ future, of some kind. For as long as he has known rage, Erik has known that his destiny is the fulfilment of it. The avenging of his mother, of his people. And after that— well, there is no after that. Or there never used to be. But there is something about Charles that enables Erik to see, perhaps, beyond that eventual execution of justice to another purpose. One that follows on from it. One in which Charles may be right about the need to stick together.

Charles shifts again, and Erik watches the play of tendons and muscles beneath his skin, the way the bedside lamp lights through the hair on his chest. Yes, he could be taught to do damage in a fight, if he had to. Erik could teach him. But why would he? The battlefield with Charles would never be physical.

“What are you thinking?” Charles says. He quirks his mouth, clearly aware that the question is, if not necessarily redundant, slightly ironic.

Charles can change people. _Does_ change people, has been doing it before Erik’s very eyes, with his gentle but dogged optimism, with the part of him that can see so clearly to the heart of someone without even looking at their mind. But he could do so much more. Erik knows plenty of people who would kill for that kind of control. To be able to rewrite a person, rewire them, the way that Charles surely can.

“You could unmake me, if you wanted to,” says Erik. The thought should be terrifying, but actually— quite apart from his not being afraid of Charles, there is something exhilarating about understanding the potential of their kind. That they can evolve this far; that they have already done so.

“Yes, I could,” says Charles, after a moment. Erik can feel it, he thinks, just the very edges of that power, caressing the outside of his thoughts, and he holds his breath. “But I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t change anything about you, Erik.”

This seems unlikely enough that Erik laughs, a short, low sound. “You could have the world at your feet, you know,” he says. He doesn’t have to have Charles in his head to read his mental flinch of discomfort at that. “All right. _We_ could, then.”

He knows that Charles hears what he means the _we_ to encompass: all of them. The no-longer-children here with them under this roof, so newly forged in the loss of their friend. And the countless others that Charles had seen in the government’s machine. The ones who were afraid and turned the two of them away, and the ones they didn’t have the time or resources to reach, and the ones that Charles hasn’t even found yet. Their people: and so many of them looking for brotherhood, whether they know it yet or not. Erik hadn’t known he was looking for it, for a long time. With Charles at their head, there would be no need to hide. They could do anything they liked.

And Erik, with Charles at his side— could do anything he liked, too. It burns at something bright in his chest, the thought of what they might accomplish together. He reaches out to touch Charles again, that dangerous tenderness welling in the pit of him as he splays a hand over Charles’s hip.

“I’m not sure it’s good for anyone to be able to do _anything_ they like,” says Charles.

“But you can,” says Erik.

Charles doesn’t answer.

Erik pulls him close again, and Charles turns so that his back is pressed to Erik’s chest, fitting into the curve of him. Erik can feel Charles’s heartbeat under his hand, the pulse of the iron in his blood, and it sends him eventually to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story, you can also reblog it [on tumblr](https://justlikeeddie.tumblr.com/post/616684017801101312/because-its-you-that-sets-the-test), where I am currently have a small lockdown-induced X-Men breakdown, apparently.


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